The Three Evangelists - Страница 2

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‘That’s a beech tree, Madame,’ the young man said.

‘Are you sure? Forgive me, but it is quite important.’

The young man looked again carefully. With his dark and as yet unclouded eyes. ‘Absolutely sure, Madame.’

‘Thank you, monsieur. You’re very kind.’

She smiled at him and walked away. The young man walked off in the other direction, kicking a small stone with the toe of his shoe.

She was right, then. It was a beech. Just a beech.

Dammit.

II

THAT WAS HOW IT STARTED.

He had been down on his luck-for how long now? About two years.

And then finally, a gleam of light at the end of the tunnel. Marc kicked a pebble, sending it about five metres up the street. It’s not so easy on the pavements of Paris to find a pebble to kick. In the country, yes. But who bothers in the country? Whereas in Paris, you sometimes really need to find a pebble and give it a good kick. Sod’s law. And, like a little ray of sunlight in the clouds, he had had the good luck, about an hour ago, to find a very suitable pebble. So he was kicking it along and following it.

His pebble had now taken him all the way to rue Saint-Jacques in the Latin Quarter, not without one or two problems. You’re not allowed to touch it with your hand, it’s strictly feet only. So, anyway, the bad luck had lasted two years now. No job, no money, no woman in his life any more. And no way out in sight. Except, perhaps, the house, or if you prefer, the ‘disgrace’. He had seen it yesterday morning. Four floors, counting the attics, plus a bit of garden, in an out-of-the-way street, and all in a totally tumbledown state. Holes everywhere, no central heating, an outside lavatory with a wooden door and latch. If you screwed up your eyes, it looked fantastic. If you opened them properly, it looked like a disaster area. On the other hand, the landlord was willing to let it at a peppercorn rent, in exchange for the tenant doing it up a bit. This house might help him get out of the hole he was in right now. What was more, there would be room for his godfather. Somewhere near the house, a woman had asked him an odd question. What was it now? Oh yes. The name of a tree. Funny how people know absolutely nothing about trees, yet they can’t live without them. But maybe they’re right. After all, he knew the names of plenty of trees and where had that got him?

The pebble went off-piste in rue Saint-Jacques. Stones don’t like going uphill. It had rolled into a gutter right by the Sorbonne, what was more. Well, farewell the Middle Ages. Farewell all those monks, lords and peasants. Marc clenched his fists in his pockets. No job, no money, no woman and no more Middle Ages. How pathetic. Skilfully, Marc propelled the pebble out of the gutter and back onto the pavement. There’s a trick to doing that. And he knew all about the trick, just as he knew all about the Middle Ages, it seemed to him. Don’t even think about the Middle Ages. In the country, you never have to confront the challenge of getting a pebble back onto a pavement. That’s why one can’t be bothered to kick a stone in the country, even though there are tons of them there. Marc’s pebble sailed smartly across rue Soufflot and manoeuvred without too much difficulty into the narrow part of rue Saint-Jacques.

Two years, then. And after two years of that, the first reaction of someone down on their luck is to look out for someone else down on their luck. Seeing friends who have succeeded, when you have made a complete mess of your life, aged thirty-five, only makes you bitter. At first, OK, it’s interesting, it gives you ideas, and encourages you to try harder. But then it begins to get on your nerves and makes you bitter. Well-known fact. And Marc wanted at all costs not to become bitter. It’s pathetic, and even dangerous, especially for a medievalist. Dispatched with a solid thump, the pebble reached the Val-de-Grâce.

There was someone else who was in his position, or so he had heard. According to information recently received, Mathias Delamarre was very seriously down on his luck, and had been for some time. Marc liked him, liked him a lot in fact. But he had not seen him for the last two years. Maybe Mathias would come in with him and rent the disgrace. Because even if it was a peppercorn rent, Marc could only manage about a third of it. And the landlord wanted a reply right away.

With a sigh, Marc negotiated the pebble to a telephone box. If Mathias agreed, he might be able to say yes to the deal. But there was one big problem about Mathias. He was a specialist on prehistoric man. As far as Marc was concerned, once you’d said that, you’d said it all. But was this the moment to be fussy about a man’s academic speciality? In spite of the terrible gulf between them, they liked each other. It was odd, but that was what you had to hold on to, this strange affection, and not the peculiar choice Mathias had made to study hunter-gatherers and flint axeheads. Marc could still remember the phone number. Someone answered, saying that Mathias had moved, and gave him the new number. Doggedly, he dialled again. Yes, Mathias was in. Hearing his voice, Marc breathed again. If a guy of thirty-five is at home at twenty-past three on a Wednesday afternoon, it’s a sure sign he’s in grade A trouble. Good start. And when he agrees, without more ado, to meet you in a down-at-heel café in rue du Faubourg Saint-Jacques, that tells you he is likely to agree to anything.

All the same.

III

ALL THE SAME. HE WASN’T THE KIND OF MAN YOU COULD PUSH around. Mathias was obstinate and proud. As proud as Marc? Possibly worse. He was the kind of hunter-gatherer who would chase his bisons until he was exhausted and then stay away from the tribe rather than return home empty-handed. No. That sounded too much like an idiot, and Mathias was more subtle than that. On the other hand, he was capable of going two days without speaking, if one of his ideas came up against reality. The ideas were probably too complex, or the desires too inflexible. Marc (who could talk for France, to the weariness of his audience) had more than once had to stop short when he came across this blond giant in the corridor of the university, sitting silently on a bench, pressing together his huge hands as if he was squeezing into pulp the contrariness of fate, a great blue-eyed hunter-gatherer, away in pursuit of his bisons. Was he from Normandy perhaps, a descendant of the Vikings? Marc realised that in the four years they had sat side by side, he had never asked Mathias where he came from. But what the hell did it matter? That could wait.

There was nothing to do in the café, and Marc sat waiting. With his finger, he was doodling on the tabletop the outline of a statue. His hands were long and skinny. He liked their precise engineering and the veins standing out on them. As for everything else about his physique, he had serious doubts. Why think of that? Because he was going to see the great blond hunter again? Well, so what? Of course, Marc, being only of middling height, and very thin, with a bony face and body, would not have made an ideal bisons-hunter. He would have been sent up a tree, more likely, to shake down the fruit. A gatherer, in other words. Full of nervous dexterity. Well, what of it? Dexterity is useful. No money, though. He did still have his rings, four big silver rings, two with gold strips, conspicuous and complicated, part-African, part-Carolingian, on the fingers of his left hand. And yes, it was true that his wife had left him for a more broad-shouldered type. A dumbo, for sure. She would work it out one day. Marc was counting on that. But it would be too late.

He rubbed his drawing out with one swift stroke. His statue had gone awry. A fit of pique. He got them all the time, these fits of irritation, these impotent rages. It was easy to caricature Mathias. But what about himself? What else was he, apart from being one of those decadent medievalists, neat, dark, delicate but tough little creatures, the prototype of the researcher after useless information, a luxury product with dashed hopes, hitching his futile dreams to a few silver rings, to visions of the millennium, to ploughmen who had been dead for centuries, to a long-lost Romance language that nobody cared about any more, and to a woman who had abandoned him? He looked up. Across the street was a large garage. Marc did not like garages. They depressed him. Striding past it with long swinging steps, came the hunter-gatherer. Marc smiled. Still blond, his hair too thick to be properly combed, wearing his eternal sandals which Marc so much disliked, Mathias was keeping the rendezvous. He was still wearing no underclothes. Nobody knew how, but you could always tell. Sweater and trousers straight on to the body, Sandals and no socks.

Well, rustic or refined, tall or thin, there they were at a table in this dingy café. So no matter.

‘You shaved off your beard,’ said Marc. Aren’t you doing pre-history any more?’

‘Yeah, I am,’ said Mathias.

‘Where?’

‘In my head.’

Marc nodded. The information had been accurate. Mathias was indeed down on his luck.

‘What’s up with your hands?’

Mathias looked down at his black nails.

‘I’ve been working in an engineering shop. They kicked me out. They said I didn’t have any feeling for machines. I managed to fuck up three in one week. Machines are complicated. Especially when they break down.’

‘And now?’

‘I’m selling tatty posters in the Châtelet Métro station.’

‘Any money in that?’

‘No. And you?’

‘Nothing to say. I used to be a ghostwriter for a publisher.’

‘Medieval stuff?’

‘Eighty-page love stories. You have this guy, untrustworthy but good in bed, and this girl, radiant but innocent. In the end they fall madly in love and it’s incredibly boring. The story doesn’t say when they split up.’